Artist's rendering of the Fresno HSR station. The boomtown of a revitalized Fresno is in the background.California High Speed Rail Authority

I read something alarming today on the front page of the LA Times:

If Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is elected governor as expected, he’ll keep building the state’s two contentious public works projects: the bullet train and twin water tunnels. But he’ll scale back both….Newsom will concentrate on completing a high-speed rail line from the San Joaquin Valley to the San Francisco Bay Area. The southern half of the ambitious project, from the valley into Los Angeles, will be delayed until the initial line proves to be financially feasible and can attract more money from taxpayers or private investors.

Wait. He’s going to build a 150-mile HSR from Fresno to San Francisco? That’s insane. It’s about a 2-3 hour drive and it’s not exactly a congested route: Fresno has a population of only 500,000 and it’s hardly a hotbed of commuter service to the Bay Area. There are a grand total of four daily flights to San Francisco and none to San Jose. Modesto and Stockton add another 500,000 potential riders to HSR-North, but they’re literally only an hour from the Bay Area. This is going to be a ghost train.

I’m not a fan of California’s bullet train, but even I agree that it’s all or nothing: the train doesn’t make even a tiny bit of sense unless it connects the state’s two big population centers. It either goes from LA to San Francisco or it goes nowhere. In this case, building half a bullet train is like building half a skyscraper: it’s worse than building nothing at all.

Thanks to the effects of the evil dex, I use Ambien so that I can sleep at night. But I’ve been waking up a little later than I’d like, so last night I tried an experiment: I took the Ambien an hour earlier than usual. I figured it would also wear off an hour earlier than usual and I’d wake up earlier.

Instead, I woke up an hour later than normal. What’s up with that? Should I try taking the Ambien another hour earlier tonight? Will that finally do the job, or will I sleep until lunchtime?

Demonstrators gathered at the U.S. Capitol on Saturday June 24, 2017 to protest a proposed Senate healthcare bill.Jeff Malet/ZUMA

I would like to reacquaint you with the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of Trumpcare, aka the American Health Care Act of 2017. This is what they said about its effect on people with pre-existing conditions:

CBO and JCT expect that, as a consequence, the waivers in those states would have another effect: Community-rated premiums would rise over time, and people who are less healthy (including those with preexisting or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all—despite the additional funding that would be available under H.R. 1628 to help reduce premiums. As a result, the nongroup markets in those states would become unstable for people with higher-than-average expected health care costs. That instability would cause some people who would have been insured in the nongroup market under current law to be uninsured.

In simple English, AHCA would have allowed states to request waivers from the requirement that everyone, including those with pre-existing conditions, be charged the same rate. In time, this would have made insurance so expensive that nobody with a pre-existing condition could afford it. On May 4th, nearly every Republican in the House voted to pass this bill.

Later, the Senate tried and failed to pass several variations on this bill. The whole process was pretty confusing, but all of their proposals eliminated protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Some of them did it directly and some of them did it only on a close look, but they all did it. All but three Republicans voted for the final bill.

In other words, forget what Republicans say. Practically every Republican in Congress is on record as actually voting for legislation that eliminates protections for pre-existing conditions and doing it repeatedly. President Trump also supported all these bills.

This is the record Democrats have to work with. They actually passed Obamacare, which manadates that insurance companies cover everyone at the same rate, even those with expensive pre-existing conditions. Republicans, by contrast, almost unanimously voted to repeal those protections.

That’s the record. That’s the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

Over the past few years Amazon has been experimenting with new software to help them make better hiring decisions:

Automation has been key to Amazon’s e-commerce dominance, be it inside warehouses or driving pricing decisions. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to give job candidates scores ranging from one to five stars — much like shoppers rate products on Amazon, some of the people said.

Hmmm. I’m not sure that machine learning is yet at a stage where it can really help much with this. On the other hand, it can be useful for ferreting out existing hiring patterns to see what Amazon’s managers seem to value most. So what did they find?

By 2015, the company realized its new system was not rating candidates for software developer jobs and other technical posts in a gender-neutral way. That is because Amazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry.

In effect, Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter. They did not specify the names of the schools….The Seattle company ultimately disbanded the team by the start of last year because executives lost hope for the project, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

This is yet another confirmation—as if we needed one—that even the best-intentioned of us are bursting with internalized biases. Most of Amazon’s managers probably had no idea they were doing this and would have sworn on a stack of C++ manuals that they were absolutely gender neutral in their hiring decisions. In fact, I’ll bet most of them thought that they bent over backward to give female candidates a break. But down in the lizard part of their brains, it was the same old story as always: they preferred hiring men to women.

There’s a limit to how much you can take away from this. It’s another example of how implicit biases can affect us all, and a warning that any system we’re responsible for training—whether it’s fellow humans or digital computers—will pick up those biases. We all know we need to be careful about passing along our biases to the next generation, and it turns out we have to be equally careful about passing them along to the software we build.

I think maybe it’s time for a little mid-afternoon break in the park.

It’s amazing. President Trump gets front-page treatment for holding a routine campaign rally. Kellyanne Conway gets front-page treatment for appearing on Fox News and pretending to be sad about Hillary Clinton’s extremism. Heidi Heitkamp gets front-page treatment for the same thing. Trump gets yet more front-page treatment for writing an op-ed in USA Today “in which almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood.”¹ Melania Trump gets front-page treatment for saying that victims of sexual abuse need “really hard evidence.” Ivanka Trump gets front-page treatment for saying she won’t become UN ambassador. Nikki Haley gets Beyoncé-style front-page treatment (eight pieces in yesterday’s New York Times) just because no one can figure out why she’s resigning at this precise micro-instant of time.

Meanwhile, you’d barely even know that Democrats are also running a campaign. Practically the only mention they get is when some member of the Trump administration attacks them. Welcome to 2018.

¹That’s Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post in his fact-check column.

Tom Williams/DPA via ZUMA

Ha ha ha ha ha:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said Tuesday that he would not allow a Supreme Court vacancy to be filled in 2020, a position that puts him at odds with the Senate’s top Republican on an issue that has inflamed partisan tensions for more than two years….“If I’m chairman, they won’t take it up,” said Grassley, whose committee is charged with holding hearings on Supreme Court nominees. “No, because I pledged that in 2016, that if the ball’s the same as it is. Now, if somebody else is the chairman of the committee, they’ll have to decide for themselves. But that’s a decision I made a long time ago.”

Jesus. For six years Patrick Leahy chaired the Judiciary Committee and stubbornly adhered to an unfavorable blue slip rule because he trusted Grassley to do the same if Republicans ever won the Senate. Needless to say, after Republicans won the Senate in 2014 and Trump won the presidency in 2016, Grassley invented an excuse to change things the very first time Democrats used a blue slip to block a nominee he wanted to confirm.

But now we’re supposed to believe that if, say, Stephen Breyer has a heart attack 15 months from now, Grassley will genially give up the chance of creating a 6-3 conservative court. After all, it’s only fair, and Republicans are all about being fair!

Well, here’s a quick test: Five years ago Grassley was part of the filibuster against all of President Obama’s nominees to fill vacancies on the DC Circuit Court. Ideology wasn’t at play, he insisted. The court was just underworked and didn’t need to be filled up. But guess what? Now that a Republican president is nominating Republican judges, things have changed: a few months ago Republicans unanimously voted to fill an empty seat on this underworked court. And with Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, now they have another empty seat to fill.

Grassley was all in favor of filling that vacancy in May, and I’ll bet he’s already revving up to fill the Kavanaugh vacancy. Oh look, he is:

Grassley tells @hughhewitt Senate could confirm Kavanaugh replacement to DC Circuit by year’s end if picked quickly.

“If we received it right now, the answer is yes, but just before Christmas.”

Nation’s 2nd most important court; GOP won’t want to risk a Dem Senate takeover.

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) October 10, 2018

Republican promises about judges aren’t worth the oxygen they use to utter them. If and when the time comes to confirm a Republican to the Supreme Court, Grassley will invent some reason why things are different this time and his promise doesn’t apply. Or, if Grassley does stick to his guns, it won’t matter: Mitch McConnell will just handle it on the Senate floor. Or maybe he’ll fire Grassley. Who knows? But they’ll confirm a Republican justice if they get a chance and Grassley knows it.

Hillary Clinton unveils a new statue of Eleanor Roosevelt outside the Bonavero Institute in Oxford.Victoria Jones/PA Wire via ZUMA

Last month, Hillary Clinton wrote an essay in the Atlantic that attacked Donald Trump’s assault on the rule of law; his assault on the legitimacy of our elections; his assault on truth and reason; his breathtaking corruption; and his assault on our national unity—by which she meant that he’s an open racist. And she put the blame right where it belongs:

This is not a symmetrical problem. We should be clear about this: The increasing radicalism and irresponsibility of the Republican Party, including decades of demeaning government, demonizing Democrats, and debasing norms, is what gave us Donald Trump. Whether it was abusing the filibuster and stealing a Supreme Court seat, gerrymandering congressional districts to disenfranchise African Americans, or muzzling government climate scientists, Republicans were undermining American democracy long before Trump made it to the Oval Office. Now we must do all we can to save our democracy.

Then a few days later she was asked if Trump has been racist. Sure, she said, but it’s much more than that: “He’s been racist, he’s been sexist, he’s been Islamaphobic, he has been anti-LGBTQ.”

Yesterday CNN asked about the swearing-in ceremony for Brett Kavanaugh:

“What was done last night in the White House was a political rally. It further undermined the image and integrity of the court,” Clinton, Trump’s Democratic 2016 election opponent, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview….”But the President’s been true to form,” she continued. “He has insulted, attacked, demeaned women throughout the campaign — really for many years leading up to the campaign. And he’s continued to do that inside the White House.”

….The former secretary of state also told Amanpour that Democrats need to draw a hard line against Republicans. “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” she said. “That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again.”

“But until then, the only thing Republicans seem to recognize is strength,” she said.

Good for Hillary! But I have sad news to report. Kellyanne Conway is upset:

“I don’t like the implications there,” she said. “It’s one thing to call us deplorable, irredeemable, laugh at people who don’t have all the privileges that she has had with her Ivy League law degree and her marriage to a much more popular man who was actually was a two-term president that she’ll never be. . . . I don’t like that kind of talk. I avoid it.”

….“I think it’s not just unfortunate and graceless, but a little bit dangerous, and I would ask her to check that,” Conway said.

Kellyanne Conway is upset! The woman who has spent two years defending the worst things to come out of President Trump’s mouth is upset. She’s the paid flack for a guy who’s openly racist, sexist, xenophobic, and just generally obnoxious and vulgar, but she thinks it’s “a little bit dangerous” when someone else points out that Trump is, in fact, openly racist, sexist, xenophobic, and just generally obnoxious and vulgar.

The mind reels. As for Hillary Clinton, she should just keep doing what she’s doing. Kellyanne Conway may be afraid that eventually the press will widely report what Hillary is saying—I wasn’t personally aware of it until the Post put Conway’s complaints on the front page—but that’s a reason to speak louder, not to shut up.

A few days ago Matt Yglesias wrote about whether family structure matters. He points to recent research that confirms the common belief that it does:

Poor kids have a better chance of being upwardly mobile if they grow up in a low-poverty neighborhood. They have a worse chance of being upwardly mobile if they grow up in a racially segregated environment with no white people around. And they have a better chance of being upwardly mobile — regardless of their own family situation — if they grow up in a neighborhood with a lot of two-parent households….It’s an interesting finding. David Leonhardt chides liberals for being reluctant to talk about it. I’m not totally averse to talking about it (after all, I am talking about it now) but I’m not really sure there’s a lot to be said about it.

Yglesias’s point is one that I’ve long agreed with. For various reasons—and research generally backs up this intuition—it seems pretty obvious that a two-parent family is better for everyone. Boys and girls both have role models close at hand. Household income is probably higher. There are two people to take care of the kids instead of just one. Family life is less stressful with two adults in the house. Etc. What’s more, highly educated liberals all endorse this view in the most convincing way possible: by overwhelmingly choosing to raise their own kids in traditional married households.

Still, even if we agree about this, what exactly can we do to promote it? That’s a real poser, and it first requires us to figure out what caused the rise of single-parent homes in the first place. There are some hints in this chart:

There are two takeaways from this:

• Two-parent homes are making a comeback. The share of children raised in one-parent homes peaked between 1995-2005 and has either flattened or declined ever since.
• Single-parent homes are most predominant among African-Americans, but have also increased by more than 2x among white families.

I said this chart contained some hints about what led to the rise of single-parent homes, and here they are:

• Up through the 90s, it was common to blame the whole thing on some unspecified rot in black culture. But that’s no longer tenable. Both Hispanics and whites have seen large increases in single-parent households too.
• Among all ethnic groups, the rise of single-parent homes peaked long ago. Whatever the original cause, it seems to have lost its power over the past couple of decades.
• Is rising poverty a contributing factor? No. Over the past 50 years or so, we’ve seen single-parent homes increase, peak, and decrease—and poverty hasn’t changed much the entire time. In fact, if you count non-cash welfare payments, poverty has decreased considerably.
• How about welfare dependency? I doubt it. Means-tested welfare as we know it didn’t really get started until 1965, and about a third of black children were already being raised in single-parent households by then. And if this is part of the reason, why the decline starting in the late 90s? Welfare reform may have had a substantial effect on cash welfare, but overall welfare spending per household continued its steady climb through the 90s all the way to the present day.
• Maybe the rise of feminism made women more choosy about their partners and they simply decided not to waste time with deadbeat husbands who were a net burden on their family? This is a fairly popular explanation, and one that I find at least a little bit plausible.

I’m not trying to cover everything here, just a few highlights. Generally speaking, I’m pretty strongly in favor of promoting two-parent households as a cultural norm—not for any moral reason, but because I think it’s better for everyone, both parents and kids. The problem is that I’ve never believed in the conservative idea that targeted programs like, say, a higher child tax credit will have any effect at all. Nor do I buy the liberal idea that we can just buy our way out of this problem with more generous welfare programs and better schools. Nor do I want to hear anything about Iceland.

I’ve just never been able to figure out what, if anything, we can do about this. And that’s largely because I can’t figure out what caused it in the first place.